Mikael Hwang

Codex extends the themes introduced in Resonance, investigating how technology reveals the anthropocentric biases underlying our interactions with nonhuman entities. As with previous works, Codex integrates biology, sound, light, and space within a pavilion, centering on a musical instrument that translates bacterial performance into three uniquely human expressions: music, algorithms, and craftsmanship.

While music has long been situated within a human-centered tradition, the project interrogates this assumption by translating bacterial activity into MIDI—digital information that can be interpreted and performed by electronic instruments. Yet, in converting these behaviors into familiar artistic conventions, the work ultimately reveals the limitations of an anthropocentric perspective.

To interpret the bacteria’s seemingly “random” signals, Euclid’s algorithm was applied to organize the data into evenly spaced rhythmic events, aligning microbial patterns with human auditory expectations. The quantized performance was then lathed as sixteen concentric rows of physical MIDI signals onto a custom-built metal record, creating a kind of codex.

A custom instrument with three tonearms enabled the playback of the codex. Designed specifically to highlight the arbitrary significance of numbers such as 3, 8, or 16 in human music, the player relayed the quantized bacterial performance by reading the codex’s MIDI signals, which could be filled with software-selected sounds. Each concentric circle played continuously until the tonearm was manually moved to another circle, transforming the apparatus into an analog Euclidean sequencer: a modern musical instrument capable of replicating the rhythmic patterns of any human music.

The codex-instrument design echoes the data loss inherent in digitization, where converting analog information to binary inevitably results in the loss of detail. This design choice highlights the limitations imposed by human traditions and raises questions about our ability to fully understand or replicate the bacteria’s original intent. Through this process, viewers juxtapose two distinct bacterial performances: the raw signals from Resonance, which resist conventional definitions of music, and the processed, humanized version, which—while more accessible—ultimately distorts microbial agency.